


Angel of music

by cutestormsloth



Category: Mad Max Fury road, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, Mad max 1 background, Music, Pre-Canon, Smol Doofling, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-26 15:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5010211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutestormsloth/pseuds/cutestormsloth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doof's mum' POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

That night, it was screams and gunfire that woke us up. Ray ran to the window. He looked at me with wild eyes.  
"Honey, it is here. Be quick!"  
Take what we can and run. That was the mission.  
"Not now... please, stay in there" i said to my pregnant belly that felt like exploding.  
Ray gave me a quick worried look from the corner where he was loading his gun.  
"We'll make it" i reassured him trough clenched teeth.

There was no time, we heard the raiders quickly approaching. Everybody in town has been ready for it. Since the power grid collapsed, it was only a matter of time. Me and Ray had, as everybody had, a suitcase at the door, ready to leave at any time. A few clothes, some medicine, canned food, few things for a baby, few sentimental things. My guitar. Books... Water was prepared in big barrels downstairs. Gasoline as well. Our old neighbors, professor Pete and Ava were included in our escape plan. I already heard them yelling outside. So it has come to this. A little apocalypse after apocalypse. Step two - end of the concept of 'home'.

I've said goodbye to our home so many times already. It was three months after the power shut down and things have gone crazy. People got crazy. I remembered back then, when the TV talked about the thread called the Nightrider, six months ago. Ray would turn it off and kiss me.  
"Don't scare our little fella" he'd say.

*

We ride and ride. Where? I don't know. Shouting, tires squeeling, motors roaring, blood and dust in the air and in my lungs. World is spinning with me as adrenaline floods my body. The baby's kicking violently, it wants out desperately from the suffocating mayhem. As do we all. 

Suddenly there's blood everywhere. A bullet flies like an angry bee, missing me an inch. 

It did not miss Ray.  
IT DID NOT MISS RAY.  
The blood is his.  
Time slows down.  
Ray.

Professor Pete takes the wheel quickly, I hold my hands on Ray's head and watch the rivers of blood oozing from his temple. My crying blends into the roar of the war outside. Inside me, It's gone quiet. 

The baby's an orphan. Ray's dead. 

Apocalypse after apocalypse after apocalypse. End of the concept "family".

 

*  
AFTER THE STORM

 

Sky' s dark blue again.  
We have escaped the war parties and the sudden quiet seems unreal. The loss of Ray still hurts so much that I almost don't feel the labor pains. Ray's buried in the cold sand. The baby is born.  
"It's a... boy" I can hear Ava say, with a weird undertone.  
I am too tired, too empty to notice there's something wrong with the baby.  
I only wish I was dead with Ray. 

I wake up when the sun' s rising and we are riding on. Ava holds a little bundle of a bloodied rag and frowns. Tiny hand sticks out of that bundle, very still.

There's no way to call him a hope of a new life amongst death. Rather another morbid joke. Apocalypse after apocalypse after...  
He does not cry and  
his eyes  
HIS EYES will never open. 

Because there aren't any eyes. Hollowed eye sockets filled with moist wrinkled skin, deformed skull, misshapen mouth... and he is just so tiny and thin. Is he awake or sleeping?  
Some of us are born to die.  
"I wouldn't give him much chance, dear.." Says Ava.  
So I´m not giving him a name.

 

*

CAVE NEAR THE BARTERTOWN.

 

He´s still alive. We settle in a cave in a mountain, the place looks quite safe. We improvise. Survive. I feed him, this strange silent baby.  
One day, Pete and Ava don't return from a supply run from nearby settlement.  
I am all alone with him.  
I look at that tiny creature, whose life relies fully on me and I suddenly feel a purpose again. I must protect this unfortunate child.  
My son, Ray's son.

I watch stars and satellites, glittering in the sky like diamonds, every night they're there, and I am gently rocking him in my arms. One night there's a comet flying by. Its tale, the beautiful luminescent cloud, blazes the sky like a trace of painter's brush. It's called a coma, i recall. Like unconsciousness. Deep sleep. Eternal sleep of an eyeless face. I name him Coma.  
And I tell him how beautiful the sky is, how blue.


	2. Chapter 2

The time gets relative when no one is around, just a blind child. It's been already some time since people stopped counting years, months and weeks. Now we only count days and nights and every one can be the last one. And in a dark cave, I have no idea about days and nights passing by. But Coma must be already over three years old. He does not speak yet.

I plant some of the carrot seeds I brought from home, and I hide the rest of them into a paper bag and put them inside my guitar. I still breastfeed Coma and I learn to harpoon lizards and shoot birds. I cook them and then grow maggots and bugs on their remains, and we eat those too. But we still have to go for supplies from time to time. It's mostly fresh water what is missing. Coma goes out with me, of course, I carry or lead him around wherever i go. He's unsteady when walking, not only because he doesn't see where to put his feet on the ground, but it looks like there is something wrong with his right leg. He's kind of dragging it behind him and when we are home, he just prefers to crawl around. He falls a lot. It's dangerous to take him on supply runs but it would be more dangerous to leave him here, all alone. When we dare to go outside, we rob into abandoned buildings, search all corners, open all boxes, we steal clothes and shoes from the corpses, and trade them in bartertown for fresh water. When there is nothing left to trade, I play guitar and sing near the gates of Bartertown and we rely on the people's good will. But there is less and less of it.

Coma seems to love music. When he listens to me playing, he gets that thoughtful expression and his chin reminds me of Ray's. He discovers the world by touch. He touches my face, looking always a bit confused when his fingers trace my eyelids and lashes. That's something he cannot find on his own face. Maybe he thinks that I am different, not him. He touches my hair, searching for those thin braids and dreadlocks to play with. When I play guitar, he sits silently and still with his fingers on the wood of the instrument, fascinated by the vibrations. When I look at him, I ask myself, what whole different wonderful world is there, inside that little misshapen skull.

And he keeps it for himself.

I speak to him, i rock him, I sing, I wait for my son to start to speak. I describe him the stars on the sky, or how our home looks like. I say to him _there's a little table, and a cooking pan hangs on the wall. A fireplace is in the middle. Your bed is on the right. The sheets you sleep, they in have little green cats printed on them. What is a cat? Oh, you would love cats! Their fur is so soft. If we ever see one we will take it home. Or rather a dog, a puppy. Cats have sharp claws and are a bit moody..._

He seems to like listening but he never says anything.

Until the day he starts to sing.

Sitting on a pillow in the middle of the room, he just starts humming to accompany my lonely guitar. It is the old song that my father taught me, the one called "Imagine" and Coma hums the melody without lyrics, in perfect, certain intonation. In the dim light of fire reflected on cave walls, he looks like a little demon and sings like an angel. I drop the guitar. It falls down with a hollow and distorted boom.

If there is no chance to teach him how to speak, there could be a possibility to give him the voice of music. I sit Coma in my lap and I play slowly, letting him touch my fingers as they move on the neck of the instrument. He seems to enjoy it. He touches the strings, then those little curious fingers wander to mine, then back to the strings, as he discovers how the whole mechanism works. Then I hold the strings in chords and he is strumming. Or he holds the chords and I am strumming. He learns so quickly.

*

He finally starts to speak around his sixth year, but mouth is not made for words. They come out slurry and he gets restless and annoyed when i correct him. So I give up. I understand his gibberish.

Soon it is me who sits listening to guitar tones in astonishment. He must be eight years old now and the guitar is still too big for him, but he can already play wonderfully. When he wants me to sing along, he plays the old songs that I taught him. Otherwise he improvises complicated melodies I couldn't even imagine coming from a child.

Cleaning his tiny fingers from blood with a wet rag and kissing them better is what i do most nights before he goes to sleep. Then he mostly begs me to read him books or tell him stories. His favorites are about great musicians of ancient times. "Beethoowen t'night, mmmama? Pleees!" He asks innocently and tilts his head to me as if he's watching me.  
"Again?" I say, "you've already heard it million times". But i tell him the story again. About a composer who never heard his last pieces, because he was deaf. He falls asleep in the middle of it. He knows all about Beethoven, Paganini, all about Mozart and his rival Salieri. About John Lennon. About songs that have the power to change people.

He also loves the story of the Phantom of the Opera, the angel of music doomed with ugliness and loneliness. He requests it when he' s feeling sad. He usually listens to it shaking his thin shoulders and sobbing quietly, but with no tears to shed.

Other times, we are just talking while he plays with my hair or I play with his. He likes stories about Before, about the world i grew up in. For him, the Before is some kind of fairytale wonderland. And we both like to imagine that the world will get better.  
"An' weell hava dog. Catss, deyr moody" He shares his visions. "But i wudnt wanna go to skool with otza kids. I wanna be wiz you ol'day. We would walk the dog each 'ay, go to Makdonadz for a meal, and in d'evening we'll listen to the radio."  
"Yes, sweetheart. That will happen one day. We'll be so happy" I answer, glad he cannot see my watery eyes.  
"But...We aar h'ppy... mamm, aren't we?" He frowns. "I am i meen... I don't need a house or a ... dog. I'm h'ppy as it iz." He says. And I smile at him trough tears, "Yes, baby. We are."

My son, a true child of the wasteland, affected and damaged by the poisonous environment, is unaware of the true cruelty that lays outside, because he's never seen it.

Every time when he falls asleep, curled up on the pile of rags we have for a bed, i watch him and think about his fate. What if I die? WHEN I die. Because sooner or later I will. I've been feeling so sick lately. He does not see the dark circles around my eyes, but I see them in the mirror, and every day they're getting deeper. Coma will stay alone one day. He is unable to see the danger that can be waiting behind any rock and any sand dune out there. He's too innocent to fight back, too slow to run away from danger. His face would get him all the unwanted attention. His playing may be beautiful, but could other people understand his speech? I know his lips well enough to read them, but would anybody else even bother? Could he ask for help? Would anybody be willing to help him?  
A Mutant. Disposable. As many others like him out there, who probably haven't survived for long. Those who were shredded by insane scavengers, eaten and used as maggot farms.

And so I pray not to die. Because that would be his death, too. A world would lose a prodigy without even knowing. Without hearing his music, like Beethoven never heard his own.


End file.
